This is the story of the “flip side” of online reputation management – when monitoring one’s online reputation brings an unexpected bounty of good news.

I won an award. A great, wonderful award. How did I learn about the award? A Google alert arrived in my inbox!

I always recommend that companies set up online “listening posts” for mentions of the company name, staff names, and industry keywords, at a minimum.  It is impossible to stay on top of all the chatter and noise online without them. If we want to know what our fans, critics and friends are saying online, we have to be listening to them. You never know when a critic will write about your company in their personal blog, mention an employee personally on Twitter, or talk about your organization’s programming on a host of online forums and social media networks. Unlike Domino’s, we don’t want to be caught unaware of a viral video that puts our company in a bad light.

What we cannot forget is that the flip side of reputation management is listening to the good things people say about your company online.

And that’s what happened to me two days ago. First, the Google Alert arrived at 10pm to my email inbox:

Google Web Alerts only offer a short excerpt of the online mention, which is not often enough to understand the context. It is advisable to click the hyperlink and read it for yourself.  I wanted to know more, so I followed the link back to WebHostMagazine.com and found this:

Wow. Pretty cool, I thought.

Two hours later, this TweetBeep (a type of Twitter alert) arrived in my email inbox:

So, of course, I traced the alert back to the original Tempus Group online “tweet” and found this:

Which prompted me to respond with this tweet to Tempus Group:

The lesson here? Don’t forget to set up your listening posts!  For monitoring Twitter, I use TweetBeep, Twitterfall, and a TweetDeck “search” is always open for “@askdebra.” I use BoardTracker to listen for keywords mentioned on discussion forums, listservs and chat groups. I use Google Alerts to catch any links or keywords scanned by Google, and I have set up a watchlist on Technorati to monitor certain keywords mentioned in blogs. I also created an alert on Socialmention to pick up anything that the other alerts missed. Of all of them, Google Alerts, Socialmention and TweetBeep are by far the most useful.

In fact without Google Alerts and TweetBeep, I would have missed a great honor and award!

Which listening posts do you use, and which are most helpful?